Rothstein Associates Inc. Business Survival ™ Weblog

These are tough times for companies and clients — with many facing bad news announcements ranging from layoffs or shortfalls to cutbacks and worse. No doubt about it: These recessionary developments and announcements harm brand value and reputation, while diminishing  consumer, investor and even employee confidence. Right now is when management and leaders need your skills the most.

In just 90 crucial minutes PR, HR, legal, security and marketing departments can learn crisis management principles and proven methods
guaranteed to help you successfully guide management, and confidently manage and communicate bad news in ways that reduce the damage while rebuilding trust, strengthening reputation and sustaining brand equity with various stakeholder groups and audiences.

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Service levels and recovery times: what’s the difference? This has come up in various discussions as the profession of business continuity understands the boundaries we face in the world of ‘production’ vs. ‘recovery’.

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Ten competencies or six for business continuity?  Depending on whose materials you’re reading, either can be correct.   The Business Continuity Institute recently published a new document which provides more detail on its six certification standards for professional practitioners.

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The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) announced that it has estimated that the UK economy is losing £11.1 billion a year, the equivalent to 0.8% of UK GDP, to major disruptions due to lack of Business Continuity Management within organisations based in the UK.

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The Continuity Insights 2009 Management Conference is coming up April 27-29, 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona.

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The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 occurred just two months after Euroclear Bank had run a major exercise to test such an occurrence. Euroclear’s application of the Business Continuity Management framework, specifically the tools and exercise methodology, to its core financial business contributed to an effective response to the impact of this financial crisis.

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If you have lost your job recently, upgrading your business continuity skills could be a really smart move to improve your marketability.

Rothstein Associates wants to help.

If you have recently lost your job, and are currently unemployed, for a limited time we will offer 10-25% discounts on books, and reduced shipping costs where feasible.

We would also be happy (within reason) to offer suggestions on skills development and marketability.

Email info@rothstein.com with specifics of your needs or the books you’re considering and we’ll do our best to help.

This offer is intended for personal use by unemployed professionals, not for student texts, corporate use or resale. Quantities, discounts may be limited. License terms for licensed content may be limited.

For the millions of Americans who have physical, medical, sensory or cognitive disabilities, emergencies such as fires, floods and acts of terrorism may present special challenges. The same challenge also applies to the elderly and other special needs populations. Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Washington Emergency Management Division (WEMD) are urging residents of Washington state to be prepared.

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The days when U.S. small and medium businesses (SMBs) were just burning DVDs from time to time to protect their data are over.   SMBs are increasingly adopting technologies like replication or disk-to-disk-to-tape backup, previously seen only in enterprise datacenters, a special report from IDC has revealed.

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The “whose budget” syndrome in business continuity management has been a hotly debated issue for some time. For the BCM auditor, the question of funding a corporate continuity process or program looks insignificant at first sight. In terms of adequacy of funding, there are no immediate difficulties – quite simply add up the numbers, and match them against typical benchmarks such as turnover, profit before tax, or any other predefined criteria. A closer look reveals that the funding (and therefore sponsorship!) structure for business continuity often leads to a hidden organizational bias.

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Most users must have had one of those bad PC days, when you arrive at work enthused to complete a task, only to end up spending the day waiting for IT to fix your newly broken PC, or in a small business often doing it yourself.

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